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Near him, she couldn’t think of anything but him. But when they were a little apart she returned to herself, and she liked that woman she came back to. Someone…capable. Someone who maintained standards, who met commitments, who produced results. Someone who would be disappointed in a man who acted the way Max so often did. She should be disappointed with him.
“Should we buckle ourselves in?” she asked, turning to him, smiling, but above his sleeping bag, his shoulders were still high and offended.
Against his cheek, she said the word love, she said love, but he covered her lips with his. She let the rest go.
The blister didn’t hurt, but the look of the thing, a bodily purple when exposed, unsettled her.
She gripped her own arms. Squeezed the muscle, stemmed the thought. Died. No. Yes, her grandmother had died, but Valentina was living, she had a job, a family, chores to finish, calls to make. She did everything right. Tragedy belonged to other people.
This was how Alisa changed her: not with invitations to go out but with the joy she carried in.
No, no, and no, Chander said, though he softened those answers with tales from childhood.
The sameness of each day, each year, acted like the endless reopening of a cut, scarring those summers into her memory.
To her cousin, Ksyusha did not have to pretend away danger.
The air tasted like wood. It hit them hard. Lada swallowed to breathe. Splinters in her throat all the way down.
The night was an immense windowless room. The stars were impossibly far away. In the crisp dark, Lada pushed back against the alcohol in her blood. She willed herself to make new memories. This moment mattered in a way the trip she wouldn’t take to Esso never could. She should not forget a second of this.
Wow
Smiling. Beautiful Masha, all grown up yet still childish. Unafraid of what harm was sure to come to her.
her lips and cheeks spun by the low wattage into dark gold.
The story of their marriage: a little love, a little rage, a lot of ocean water.
She carried a sense, wrapped in whiskey, that someone once more understood where she was coming from.
She felt that old tug he put in her. A finger hooked under her ribs.
The cold grabbed her lungs in two fists.
“She’s the same as she was,” Nadia said, “only more.” “Aren’t we all?”
You believe that you keep yourself safe, she thought. You lock up your mind and guard your reactions so nobody, not an interrogator or a parent or a friend, will break in. You earn a graduate degree and a good position. You keep your savings in foreign currency and you pay your bills on time. When your colleagues ask you about your home life, you don’t answer. You work harder. You exercise. Your clothing flatters. You keep the edge of your affection sharp, a knife, so that those near you know to handle it carefully. You think you established some protection and then you discover that you
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It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter.
